Q's Q: An Arboreal Narrative

In his new fiction, playwright, poet and novelist Mac Wellman has created a hilarious satire of American theater. Chris Name, a nobody working at the local Sweet Thumb River Valley Reactor Complex, is suddenly taken up by a local theater director, who presents Name's play, the performance of which ends in the death of the theater company's chief and in the end of more than one theater career.

As in Wellman's acclaimed fiction Annie Salem and his satire of New York's art and literary denizens, The Fortuneteller, Wellman has created in this new work a world peopled by cantankerous, wistful, confused, and frightened people who have lost parts of their body, their minds, and their souls in the perpetual machine of the American dream.

One of America's most renowned and respected playwrights, Mac Wellman has written over 40 plays for the American theater, including A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, Second-Hand Smoke and The Lesser Magoo (all published in two volumes by Green Integer). He has also written several books of poetry.

Wellman teaches at Brooklyn College in New York, and has been awarded numerous grants, including awards from the McKnight and Rockefeller Foundations, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.